"For example, choosing sugar is shaped by the addictive nature of sugar; it is not a free choice."

If sugar is addictive then our child, the genetic spawn of two sweets loving people, who grew up in a house where sweet foods were always available, should be floundering in a sugary haze. He doesn't much care for sweets. When he was little and would go out on halloween, he'd come home and give his candy to his dad. David would eat all the good stuff and then the bag would sit around for months and finally get thrown out.

I could have decided Dylan was doomed to a life of sugar addiction because both his parents liked sweets. But I had read some ideas that it was the rareness of sweets in a kids life that made them more valuable and I wondered if Dylan could have a better sense of balance than his dad and I had. Dylan has never eaten a candy bar. He's never eaten Twinkies or any of the other packaged Twinkie like things. He doesn't like pie. He doesn't eat sweet cereal. He doesn't like hard candy or soft candy or gummy candy. He doesn't like Kool-Aid. He drinks cola.

I still really like sweets. I bake a lot. I don't feel guilty about it anymore. I don't feel like I shouldn't be eating it, I enjoy sweets and I eat them whenever I want. But it turns out, I eat less than I did twenty years ago or even ten years ago. Something about knowing I can have whatever I want, whenever I want it and that I won't punish myself with guilt about it has made that difference.

So, I don't believe sugar is addictive. I believe some people naturally like sweets more than others and I believe our attitude about sugar, about any food, creates more problems than the food itself. I think one of the best things we can do to ensure a healthy attitude about foods for our kids is to not screw up their psychology with fear and guilt and dire warnings.

Deb Lewis
(full discussion in the archives of Always Learning)

I used to honestly believe that my son was really sensitive to sugar and that consuming it changed his behavior in negative ways. Then someone (at an unschooling conference) mentioned some of these ideas—how sometimes we blame behaviors on something like sugar but the problem is really *our* own perception of what is going on and not the actual reality of what is happening. They said it more clearly than that, but that's what I took away from it and when I really thought about it and examined the situation and really watched my child I could see that it was true.

At the time we were going through a pretty long period where we really limited sugar and we still had all the same kinds of "behavior problems" that we would previously blame on sugar. If it happened for no identifiable reason, then we wondered why our son was acting like this. If it happened after he had sugar, then we blamed it on the sugar. I guess it was convenient to have something to lay the blame on, and when he didn't eat sugar but was still acting the same way I was confused and frustrated and didn't understand why my child was acting like that. I think part of me really wanted to believe that it was caused by sugar because at least I had an answer with an easy fix. Only it makes me sad that I didn't realize sooner that the easy fix (limits on sugar) wasn't really helping at all and that should have been a big clue that sugar wasn't the problem in the first place.

Anyway, I am glad that someone pointed this out to me and that I was ready to hear it at the time. I'm glad to see some of the same ideas coming up here because there might be someone else like me out there.

I'm hoping Schuyler Waynforth or Julie Daniel could tell the story of the sugar cubes, or someone can find or retell the bowl-of-M&Ms account. Thanks!

The sugar cube story isn't mine, although I play a role. It is a story that Julie tells and I only learned about in great retrospect.

The story was that Adam (when he was four maybe) started to eat packets of sugar in cafes and coffee shops - he would just open them and tip them into his mouth. I was feeling really anxious about it and thinking that it couldn't be good for him and I would try to move/hide the sugar pots before he sat down so that he wouldn't see them. Or I would say "That's enough sugar now" after he had eaten a few packets. We weren't limiting other things at home and that was all working fine. I thought that I had "got it" about the economics of restricting food but now I think that maybe I felt particularly bothered about the sugar in coffee shops because I imagined that other people might be looking at me and thinking what a bad mother I was for allowing my child to eat refined sugar right out of the packet! And the more anxious I was the more he seemed to want to eat it (duh!)

Around that time we visited Schuyler and she said to me that she remembered eating sugar as a child (I did too but I had somehow managed to forget that.) and she said she remembered that it was really nice, it felt good on your tongue. And she suggested I buy a box of sugar cubes and put them somewhere where Adam could access them freely, just like the food at home. So I bought two boxes and put one on his small table in the kitchen. The first day he ate *lots and lots* of sugar cubes (maybe fifteen or more). I though "oh no, this isn't working" but I breathed and waited. The next day he ate quite a lot but not as many as the first day. By about day five or six he was eating maybe a couple of sugar cubes a day and after that he just stopped! He hadn't finished the box at that point and it sat on his table for several weeks. I used it up in cups of tea for visitors and the second box is still in the cupboard in case he wants it someday.

Occasionally he still eats a packet of sugar in a coffee shop. Sometimes if I am ordering at the counter and the sugar is up there rather than on the tables I pick up a couple of sachets and bring them back to the table for him. Sometimes he eats the ones I bring, sometimes he doesn't.

That's it really. I don't think my anxiety / hiding the sugar was helpful to either of us and I much prefer it this way.

Living in fear about purported truths can make anything seem true. When I lived in fear concerning my kids consuming sugar and/or high fructose corn syrup I could swear that it changed their behavior. Truthfully though, it didn't, and it still doesn't now that I've moved past living in fear.

Absolutely. I've given up telling folks that sugar doesn't make kids hyper, they simply don't believe it. The link below will take you to a sweet little article that sums up the research done on this topic.

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2747/does-giving-sweets-to-kids-produce-a-sugar-rush

Most interesting to me was the study where they told the moms they were testing for the effects of sugar on behavior, but they were really testing the moms' reactions. It's in the article linked above, but here's [some of the article by Cecil Adams]:

Why would a sizable chunk of the child-rearing population continue to swear it (the sugar/hyperactivity link) exists? For a crucial piece of the puzzle we turn to the Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology and a 1994 study by Daniel Hoover and Richard Milich, in which they looked at 31 boys ages five to seven and their mothers, all of whom had described their offspring as being "behaviorally affected by sugar."

The mom-son teams were split into the customary two groups: the moms in one were told their sons would be given extra-sugary Kool-Aid, while the others were told their kids were in the control group and would get a drink sweetened with aspartame. In reality, though, the same artificially sweetened stuff was administered to both sets of kids while the women got a sheaf of surveys to fill out. Mothers and children were then videotaped playing together, after which the moms were asked how they thought things went.

What did Hoover and Milich find? You guessed it: the moms who thought they were in the sugar group said their sons acted more hyper. In addition, they tended to hover over their children more during play, offer more criticism of their behavior, etc. The mother-son pairs in the other group were judged by observers to be getting along better. What's more, those moms who, going into the experiment, most strongly believed their kids were sugar-sensitive also scored highest on a test designed to gauge cognitive rigidity.

From there, of course, it's not too hard to whip up a hypothesis explaining why the sugar-high myth persists. Having always heard that sugar makes kids act crazy, some parents, particularly those hailing from the control-freak end of the spectrum, may go a little crazy themselves when the sugary stuff enters the picture. In situations where sweets are freely available to their children - like birthday parties or other high-stimulation events - they watch worriedly for any sign of obstreperousness, see it even if it's not there, call it hyperactivity, and attribute it to the cookies and cake. Kids, meanwhile, typically aren't oblivious to this sort of anxiety; consciously or not, they may well figure out that after taking on a load of candy they're expected to run amok and happily oblige.

I've seen this active group of boys play enthusiastically together on many occasions, and my guess is that sugar was probably not always involved. ;-) And let's not forget to mention that they'd been sitting through a class and were probably now really ready to move.

I think some people talk about a sugar high now in such commonly accepted terms, flying in the face of how science has shown us that bodies react to sugar, that its just a short-hand for a group of kids playing energetically. "Oh, they must be on a sugar high."

Joanna
(edited slightly by Sandra to protect the goofy.)

Sugar causes hyperactivity.

False, but repeated OFTEN in sitcoms and comedies, and by moms who want to limit and shame their kids.

BBC article on Sugar and Hyperactivity in which parents are tricked, and can't tell the difference

http://www.cnn.com/HEALTH/children/9911/22/diet.sugar.myth.kids.wmd/
http://www.usnews.com/articles/science/medical-science/2008/12/17/5-surprising-holiday-health-myths.html I think you need a subscription to get to back issues.

Food and eating Myths Too Many Parents Believe "Building an unschooling Nest"